Computation of online video, such as clips and movies, continues its inimitable rise. Online videos are expected to be prominent sources of advertisements. As such, video playback is considered an essential feature of modern computing devices. This is especially true in mobile computing devices, for example, smartphones, music players (e.g., iPad®), wearable computing devices, tablet computers, game consoles, and the like.
Currently, consumption of multimedia content and specifically online video through mobile computing devices is through a mobile application (“app”) or web browsers. A mobile application (such as a native application or a web application) is programmed to serve content to users. As such, a mobile application can be programmed or configured to allow auto play of online video. Auto play refers to the ability to play video (or other content) as the video is uploaded to the mobile computing device. That is, a user of such a device is not required to “press” or “tap” on a play button. As an example, mobile applications provided by Facebook® and YouTube® enable automatic playback of videos.
In contrast to the mobile applications uniquely or purposely designed to enable auto play of online video, operating systems of mobile computing devices disable such a feature in standard web browsers. Specifically, such operating systems disable the operation of HTML5 new syntactic features. Such HTML5 features are defined in HTML5 using, for example, video, canvas, and object tags. Currently, web browsers, such as Chrome® for Android® and Safari® for iOS®, do not implement HTML5 syntactic features. As a result of this limitation, current mobile web browsers cannot play video using HTML5.
One solution discussed in the related art to allow auto play of video is through resources universally supported by mobile web browsers. The solution divides a video sequence into a silent video stream and an audio stream. Then, still images are extracted from the silent video stream and later combined into a composite image. This process is performed by a server communicatively connected mobile computing devices.
To play the composite image as a video sequence, the existing solution loads the composite image through a viewport, selects one of the still images of the composite image, sets the viewport to display the selected still image, and sets a timer for a specified time period, so that at the expiration of the time period the next still image is displayed in the view port until the entire composite image is displayed.
Existing solutions that are based on imaging a video stream suffer from various limitations. The video quality is sacrificed as a result of segmenting the video into still images. As such, high definition or high quality video cannot be played to their required quality. Furthermore, such existing solutions require pre-processing by a server to generate the composite image. Therefore, video to be displayed on computing devices cannot be updated in real-time.
It would be therefore advantageous to provide a solution for allowing auto playback of video on mobile computing devices that overcomes at least the deficiencies noted above.